2026 Summer Residents
avery r. young
is Chicago’s inaugural Poet Laureate and American Poet Laureate Fellow, interdisciplinary artist avery r. young is also a co-director of The Floating Museum. His art practice spans poetry, libretto, film, curation, and performance works featured in national and international exhibitions, theater, festivals, and anthologies. During young’s time at Sunlit, he will be working on a new opera work, tentatively titled an un-heavy. Inspired by the actions of members of the Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters, who were instrumental in getting Emmet Till’s remains safely to Chicago in 1955, young plans to craft a libretto to unfold a story of a group of Pullman porters who deliver the remains of a lynched youth to that child’s mother. The work’s libretto will feature soloem [a new poetic form developed by young during his tenure as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Chicago], and the score merging blues and gospel group singing. He also plans to collaborate with Ithaca College’s Music and Performing Arts departments.
Irene Franco Rubio
(she/her/ella) is a writer, scholar-activist, and storyteller from Phoenix, Arizona. Born into a working-class family shaped by migration from Guatemala and Mexico, she grew up amid border enforcement, racialized policing, and community resistance in the U.S. Southwest. Irene’s work blends abolitionist ideas, narrative nonfiction, and community-engaged scholarship. Trained as a sociologist at the University of Southern California and in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, she researches immigration detention and carcerality, emphasizing multiracial coalition-building and movement knowledge. She is the creator and host of the #SchoolsNotPrisons podcast, which amplifies the voices of directly impacted youth and community members on the carceral state and abolition. During her residency at Sunlit, Irene will develop a memoir-in-essays project that examines immigration detention as a racialized system shaping belonging, care, and personhood. The work explores how detention and surveillance function not only as institutional practices but also as intimate forces influencing family life, grief, memory, and survival across generations. Grief serves as a central focus in the project, both as a personal experience and as a collective condition created by state violence, separation, and neglect. Through reflective writing and abolitionist imagination, the project illustrates how communities hold onto loss, practice care, and sustain collective resistance in the face of oppression.
Kristine Chung Salcedo
(she/her) is a Korean American writer at work on her first novel. She earned her MFA from The New School and is an alum of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Tin House Summer Workshop, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Kristine also serves as a Board Member and Secretary of ARTS By The People, a nonprofit creative arts organization. At Sunlit, she will revise her historical novel set in Korea, which explores colonial occupation, cultural erasure, familial loyalties and betrayals, Korean identity as a form of resistance to imperialism, and the power of narrative, both political and personal. Originally from the Philadelphia area, Kristine lives in New Jersey with her husband, daughter, and son.
Lau Malaver
[they/them] is an Assistant Professor of Race, Ethnic, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at St. Olaf College. Malaver's research project, Recovecos: Race, Time, and the Performance of Trans Embodiment, investigates 21st-century trans and queer cultural productions in the Américas through the theoretical framework they term Recovecos (Spanish for nooks, hidden turns, twists), which is the relationship of space and time. Malaver is on the Editorial Board of Transgender Studies Quarterly, and has published in ASAP/J: Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Journal, Chiricu Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, Ecumenica: Journal of Performance and Religion, among others. Malaver has received recognition for their performance work at the Denver Art Museum, through a creative residency with B2 Center for Art, Media, and Performance, and as a working group facilitator with the New York University Institute of Performance and Politics. Lau is also a fiction writer.
Trans Jolts: Space, Time, and the Political Economy of Trans Life is a scholarly book project situated at the intersection of Critical Ethnic Studies, Trans Studies, and Performance Studies. The project examines 21st-century trans cultural production across the Américas, including performance art, film, photography, literature, and community archives to theorize “trans jolts” as moments of rupture that unsettle dominant understandings of time, space, embodiment, and political economy. These jolts are not merely moments of harm or interruption; they are also generative sites where trans communities cultivate alternative modes of survival, care, memory, and material sustenance in the face of colonial, racial capitalist, and cisnormative violence
Louise Hung
is a Chinese American writer born in Hong Kong and raised in the Pacific Northwest and Southwest. Her middle-grade book Hungry Bones (Scholastic Press 2024) is the recipient of the 2026 Asian Pacific American Award for Children's Literature and a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection. Louise's literary work explores how Chinese beliefs involving death, spirits, and ancestors enrich and engage young people in the Chinese diaspora. While at Sunlit, Louise will be working on her next novel, Find Maggie Tam, a story that follows a Chinese American girl from her community in the American Midwest to her ancestral home of Hong Kong as she searches – with the help of some ghostly guides – for her missing mother. This middle-grade novel explores the space (or lack thereof) that young people are given to grieve, as well as the search for belonging that many immigrant kids, children of immigrants, and children of mixed heritage struggle with. As with Hungry Bones, Louise hopes her next book will help Asian American kids to find joy, pride, and agency in their identity. Louise holds an MFA in Directing for the Theater from the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in new works for young audiences. She lives in Brooklyn with her four black rescue cats and her husband.
Max Wheeler
is a trans writer and teacher from Oakland, CA. His work can be found in Split Lip, Gulf Coast, trampset, Astrolabe, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, and his short story about a snail was included in Best Small Fictions 2024. He is the translations editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review. His work has received support from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands. These days, you can usually find him in the Sonoran Desert, pursuing an MFA at Arizona State University and making friends with the cacti and the birds. While at Sunlit, he will be working on a novel that draws connections between transgender embodiment, family dynamics, and settler mistreatment of land and water bodies of California, from the San Francisco Bay to the Mokelumne River watershed in the Sierra Nevada.
Meredith Seung Mee Buse
is an author, educator, and Korean American transracial adoptee. Her debut picture book, Emily Min-Ji Makes Kimchi, is forthcoming in spring 2027, and her creative nonfiction essay, Variations on a Theme, will be published in an edited anthology on transnational adoptee origins in 2026. Her writing reflects the adoptee experience with candor, hope, and joy, and has appeared in The Citron Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Komerican Pie, Severance Magazine, Diverse Bookfinder, and Adoptee Reclaimed. At Sunlit, she will be drafting her debut memoir, which details her journey to adoptee-consciousness through her first trip home to South Korea, her birth family search, and her struggle to resituate herself in the context from which adoption displaced her. Meredith has received scholarships from the Highlights Foundation for children’s literature (2023, 2025) and is a 2026 Periplus Fellow. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and two kids.
Ruth Minah Buchwald
(she/her) is a Seoul-born writer from New Jersey. Her work navigates biracial identity, Korean and Korean American histories, shame, desire, humor, generational divides, and the internet as a metaphysical space that takes on a life of its own. Her writing has been published in or supported by The Creative Independent, ELLE, Autostraddle, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Margins, CRAFT, and Ma-Yi Theater Company. At Sunlit, Ruth will be working on short fiction and the first draft of her novel about a mixed Korean and Jewish American family in early 2000s New Jersey, where a mother and daughter get sucked into cults online. She is based between Brooklyn, NY—where she curates and hosts lactose intolerant, an anti-clout reading series featuring writers of color in NYC (@lactoseintolerantnyc)—and Austin, TX, where she is an MFA candidate in fiction at the New Writers Project at UT–Austin.
Swati Sudarsan
is a writer from Michigan. She was a 2025 Asian American Writers' Workshop Margins Fellow, a 2025 Periplus Fellow, and won the Bread Loaf Conference Katharine Bakeless Nason Award. A trained epidemiologist, she earned her MPH at Johns Hopkins University and worked in international public health until 2024. She now resides in Brooklyn and manages event programming at McNally Jackson Books. During her time at Sunlit, she will work on her manuscript for a campus novel that investigates the perversion of nurturing, the multi-layered meaning of consumption, and the limitations of institutions in providing healing.
